Enlightenment Through Understanding

Chinese nationals pour more than $150 billion over five years into US real estate

But during the same period, at least $127 billion went into US homes, and in the 12 months to March 2015 — the latest period for which relatively comprehensive data could be gathered — home purchases totalled $39 billion.

That put the Chinese past Canadians, who have long been the biggest foreign buyers of US residential real estate.

Geographically, Chinese buyers are concentrated in the most expensive markets: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, but Chicago, Miami and Las Vegas have also drawn buyers.

But isn’t America supposed to be in decline due to wealth inequality, says the left? Or isn’t housing supposed to be a bubble, says Shiller? The wealthy, smart Chinese are ignoring the left, buying real estate in high-IQ regions like the Bay Area, and it makes the left angry that the Chinese are ignoring the doom and gloom. The left has been predicting a bubble in Bay Area real estate since 2012, and they keep being wrong. Same for that moron and human bullhorn Peter Schiff, who has been sounding the false alarm for crisis since 2009, to no avail. Smart, productive people will keep making the left look like fools. People who predict crisis are wrong 99% of the time and sit on the sidelines as everyone else makes money. Just as there is no bubble in technology, there is no bubble in high-end real estate. Instead, it’s a flight to quality as the wealthy Chinese look for safe havens to park their piles of cash. In bubbles, low-quality assets become overpriced. Even in web 2.0, only the cream of the crop (Uber, Air BNB, Snapchat, Slack, Pinterest) are seeing stratospheric but sustainable valuations, while low-quality companies like Jawbone, Fitbit, and Gopro smolder.